The Lottery of Fathers
Some hit the jackpot; others, not so much
Recently, I was looking into a song-cycle by Daniel Asia, the American composer (who is a friend of mine, which is neither here nor there, but true). The cycle is called Breath in a Ram’s Horn: Songs for My Father. It sets five poems of Paul Pines, a New Yorker who lived from 1941 to 2018. The last poem begins,
My father’s name was
Bernard.
He screwed up in certain ways
but he was a good man,
gave me what he could.
That’s a little gentler than Philip Larkin in “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”
Well. People have been complaining about their parents since the caves, surely. It’s a rite, and probably a right. Some people just don’t get the parents they deserve. But can it be said, too, that some people don’t get the children they deserve?
You and I have known examples of both cases, no doubt.
Fathers are as various as people. We have the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the great. John Adams, our second president, was a great man. Great father? A bear of a father, we can say. He once wrote to his eldest son, John Quincy, “If you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession but of your Country it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy.”
No pressure.
When a second Bush became president, 175 years after the second Adams, his father teasingly called him “Quincy.” The Bush sons adored their father, and revere his memory. Jeb Bush tried to become president himself in the 2016 cycle.
In that period, I wrote a piece called “The Dynasty Question.” The truth is, sons follow fathers into lines of work—including politics. I was astonished to find how many candidates in the 2014 midterm elections had been sons, or daughters, of politicians.
People follow their fathers into all kinds of fields: law, medicine, sports,
writing . . .
I have known many writer sons of writers. Christopher Buckley (son of William F. Jr.). William Kristol (son of Irving, and of the historian Getrude Himmelfarb). John Podhoretz (son of Norman, and of another writer, Midge Decter). Adam Bellow (son of the Nobel laureate Saul). Álvaro Vargas-Llosa (son of the Nobel laureate Mario).
In music, there are any number of pairings. Take the Big Three alone: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. They were all sons of professional musicians. What if Leopold Mozart, say, had been a salt miner (in “Salt City,” which is to say Salzburg)? Would Wolfgang Amadeus have become head of the mines?
I further think of conductor pairs—father-and-son conductors in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Kleibers (Erich and Carlos). The Plassons (Michel and Emmanuel). The Jordans (Armin and Philippe). The Masurs (Kurt and Ken-David). The Järvis—who are not a pair but a threesome: Neeme and his sons Paavo and Kristjan.
The Kleibers had a difficult, strained relationship. And Johann Strauss Sr.—to go back to the 19th century—was a positive SOB of a father. Not only was he unsupportive of Johann Jr. (who was more talented), he tried to sabotage his career.
In the lottery of fathers, Stephen Sondheim was not a winner. At all. He was not a winner in the lottery of mothers either. At all. He was oh-for-two. But he had a good friend, Jamie Hammerstein, at whose house he spent a lot of time. Jamie’s father became a second father to Stevie.
Thus did one of the greatest lyricists of the first half of the 20th century—Oscar Hammerstein II—mentor one of the greatest of the second half. Would Sondheim have worked in the musical theater anyway? Maybe. But he once said that if Jamie’s dad had been a geologist, “I probably would have been a geologist too.”
Some years ago, I wrote a book about the sons and daughters of dictators: Children of Monsters. Some of these monsters were good, or goodish, parents. Others were monstrous parents.
Pol Pot had one child, a late-in-life daughter, whom he loved. Idi Amin had more: 60, from 21 mothers. The first and last were born almost 50 years apart. To a good number of these children, Amin was “Big Daddy,” fun-loving. Exiled in Jeddah, he would drive some of them around in his Chevy Caprice Classic.
Edda Mussolini adored her father. Raghad and Rana Hussein adored theirs. They loved their husbands too—whom their fathers ordered killed. Which is awkward.
(My flippancy aside, you can imagine, or try to imagine, the torment of the women.)
Josef Stalin was a very bad father, especially to his son Yakov—Yakov Dzhugashvili. He would not even accord that son his own adopted name, “Stalin.” He left him with the original, Georgian name. In Stalin’s eyes, wrote another of the dictator’s children, Svetlana, “Yakov could do nothing right.” Their father “had no use for him and everybody knew it.”
When Yakov tried to commit suicide, Stalin cracked, “He can’t even shoot straight.”
Last month, Jalen Rose touched many people when he spoke openly of his father, Jimmy Walker. Walker was an NBA standout; Rose would become one too. He never met his father. Walker had 13 children by 11 women.
What Rose revealed was this: In 1993, when Rose was in college, a journalist handed him a letter from his father. Rose did not open it, afraid of what the contents might be, and the effect they might have on him. He carried around that letter for seven years. It was like a weight in his pocket. Finally, he opened it (and Walker had told him he was proud of him).
“Honour thy father and thy mother,” goes a commandment. People have been chewing over that commandment—interpreting it—for eons. From Jesus, we get this: “And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.” Another scripture to chew on.
Whoever you are, wherever you stand: Happy Father’s Day.
Hi Jay.
My dad, Charlie Brennan, the Cop, was also a bricklayer (went on the cops during the Depression), and he built the house his children grew up in. I was 6 when he started, and 10 when he finished. He taught me how to lay brick, of course (no pun intended), but also things like the importance of a truly square corner, how to climb a ladder with a loaded hod, and why it's better to encourage and challenge a child than to critique and correct. He was the person who told me that the Protestants "had their turn," and so did the Irish and the Jews and so on; and now it was time for the Hispanics and the Blacks. He also taught me never to judge a person I didn't know, to never hold a grudge, and to always be ready to forgive. He is hero. I will never be his equal,
Heritage, just as nationality, is such a gift. It's difficult for me to imagine being anything other than the son of a son of a farmer who failed in the dust bowl only to succeed in the post-war beef cattle industry. As I tell my friends, their problem is they picked the wrong grandfather. But it's me who lucked into a family shaped by a good response to bad circumstances.